Need-based school funding – a path to promoting good working conditions and reducing teacher turnover?

Across countries, teachers experience difficult working conditions and are prone to switch workplaces or leave the profession altogether. High teacher turnover adversely affects society by causing a shortage of qualified educators and disrupting instructional continuity, negatively impacting student learning.

The project aims to examine the role of teachers’ work conditions in teacher turnover, hiring, and retention in Sweden. We focus on the role of need-based school funding in improving prerequisites and conditions for organizing and undertaking work in schools. The project answers four questions:

1. Which aspects of a school’s working conditions predict teachers’ sick leave absences and teacher turnover in Sweden?
2. Does need-based school funding improve working conditions in schools with a high fraction of migrant and socio-economically disadvantaged students?
3. How does need-based school funding impact teachers’ terms of employment?
4. Does need-based school funding enable disadvantaged schools to attract and retain teachers with high educational and formal competence?

The project uses high-quality Swedish register data on the universe of teachers and their working conditions and purposively collected data on municipal school funding. We build a longitudinal data set to track teachers’ decisions to switch schools or exit the profession and map it to their working environment and terms of employment. To examine the effects of school funding on working conditions, we use quasi-experimental methods and analyze changes in municipalities’ school funding policies. Specifically, we analyze the causal effect of need-based school funding on teachers’ working conditions and turnover. A specific focus is on unequal working conditions within and across municipalities and schools.